(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a bandwidth allocation apparatus and a method thereof. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus for adaptively allocating radio channels in a mobile communication system, and a method thereof.
(b) Description of the Related Art
The next generation mobile communication system will mainly handle multimedia traffic services having various features.
Thus, the next generation mobile communication system controls a bandwidth for efficient processing of multimedia traffic while satisfying communication quality of service (QoS).
A significant increase of usable resources for each cell is expected in the next generation mobile communication system compared to the present mobile communication system. For example, each cell is allocated with up to 2 Mbps of bandwidth in the WCDMA system but it will be allocated with up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth in the next-generation mobile communication system. Therefore, a bandwidth allocation determination scheme will be an important factor for an efficient use of radio resources and multimedia traffic processing in the next generation communication system.
The bandwidth allocation determination scheme will be more complex in the future since various types of traffic will be generated as user traffic is changed from small-capacity voice and data communication to large-capacity multimedia communication.
Particularly, video traffic is a main concern in the multimedia traffic, and various studies have been conducted to develop an efficient bandwidth allocation scheme thereof.
One of the most well-known bandwidth allocation schemes is an effective bandwidth scheme. The effective bandwidth scheme produces a value between an average bandwidth and the maximum bandwidth, and the value satisfies a communication quality of service (QoS) traffic requirement (e.g., packet loss rate and delay).
The concept of the effective bandwidth scheme is quite attractive, but it is difficult to apply to a substantial communication system. Also, it is difficult to determine an effective bandwidth for video traffic in advance.
Conventionally, communication QoS for voice traffic has been controlled by providing a predetermined communication QoS or controlled by determining priority of services depending on a condition (e.g., a bottleneck) of a system.
However, multimedia traffic services having various features have distinctive service characteristics, and accordingly they cannot be indiscriminately controlled by the conventional communication QoS scheme.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.